The Museum of Art & Archaeology on the University of Missouri-Columbia campus is not an extravagant building from the outside. It sits in Pickard Hall, a parking lot away from the bustling foot traffic of Ninth Street. Next door, the building holds its own against the rowdy sounds of construction as the journalism school’s latest addition is retooled, reconstructed to be filled with the most up-to-date pieces of media machinery.

Architecturally, Pickard Hall will remain as it has the past 50 years, housing the relics of eras past, the worn stone statuettes and fragile paper prints, pieces saturated in history.

Exhibit

● Current exhibit: “Final Farewell:
The Culture of Death and the Afterlife,” on display until May 20.

● Tickets for next weekend’s
Paintbrush Ball are no longer available. For information on the museum or how to make a donation, visit maa.missouri.edu or call 882-3591.

But changes are afoot to attract, entertain and educate a 21st-century audience. Museum staff members are turning to all the tools of modern day: Podcasts, blogs and the Internet, all in somewhat stark contrast to what visitors see upon entering the building.

The permanent exhibit of plaster casts of Roman and Greek statues greets visitors in the main downstairs gallery. The plaster casts certainly transport viewers to a time of togas and olive branches in ages long ago, but there is a more local and recent history to them as well.

The casts are the original pieces acquired by John Pickard, for whom the hall is named, in the late 19th century. Pickard was a professor of classical archaeology and art history and founded the Department of Art History and Archaeology in 1892. The sculpture casts were originally displayed on the third floor of what is now known as Jesse Hall. By the 1930s, the department had separated into two different schools, and the casts vanished, hidden behind curtains until 1957, when Saul Weinberg reunited the academic disciplines and revived the museum in Pickard Hall.

This story is one of many the statues carry. But the paintings and portraits throughout the rest of the building bear an equal number of tales, both artistic and historic.

“We haven’t figured out a way to tell everything at once, but if you’re really good, you can find a way to tell everything just starting from that one point,” said Alex Barker, director of the museum, which will celebrate its 50th anniversary at next weekend’s Paintbrush Ball, the museum’s annual fundraising gala.

Barker can’t say how or why the departments were ever separated. The two disciplines work together to look at the past using the same relics. They just look at them differently.

“If you think about it, history is being traced with the developing canons of Western art,” said Barker. “Art history as an academic discipline: Archaeology can be looking at much the same thing, but they do it using different methods. Archaeology uses field excavation, studying things in their context, whereas art history is looking at the objects themselves and the changing styles, changing conventions over time.”

A greater challenge than uniting the themes of the two disciplines is uniting the presentation of the collections to fulfill the museum’s dual role in the learning community. On the one hand, it must play host to the upper academic audience of the university, with students and professors alike seeking specific information about certain collections or pieces. But at the same time, the museum must also be accessible to community groups and young schoolchildren who often look for a broader scope of information.

“To find the balance between them, there is no simple way of doing it,” said Barker. “That’s one of the reasons our exhibits are always changing. Partly it’s to rotate things out so there are always new things on display, but partly it’s because we’re always tweaking some exhibit to see what better fits the needs of our audiences.”

Regardless of what initially brings visitors into the museums, the galleries’ offerings often speak to something beyond the educational aspect.

“When people come to the museum in general, they’re coming because they want to see beautiful art,” Barker said. “They want to have that experience only a museum can give: coming face to face with all kind of objects and being engaged with the real thing.”

And Barker and the museum staff have taken it upon themselves to explore new ways of engaging visitors by using new technologies to bring displays of the past and presenting them in an up-to-date manner. Barker said he would like to find a better way to present the stories behind the pieces to visitors. Museums, he said, have for so long relied solely on a simple card or plaque to communicate with visitors, which often cannot do the pieces’ provenances justice.

“One of the things that museums have never been good at is getting to those wonderful stories that energize objects and communicate them for people,” Barker said. “Communicating that to everybody is really hard. And yet it lies at the core of what museums do. Museums as an enterprise, as a concept, are supposed to be temples to the muses. Those can either be really staid and stuffy places with classical columns and dust everywhere, or they can be what they were supposed to be, which are places to worship the original muses, who are all the things that make life worthwhile.”

Already the museum has begun to post information about certain pieces and acquisitions on its Web site. Museum staff members have also begun to write blog entries, to which site and gallery visitors are encouraged to respond. Barker said the museum has also recently acquired the equipment to begin creating Podcasts that will allow patrons to take audio tours of the galleries or listen along as the artwork is presented on the video screens of their iPods.

“Now technology allows us more opportunities to engage people in a dialogue about art. You can have whatever’s on that sign also available on the Web, and people can say, ‘You know, that may be a really important piece of 20th-century art, but my 2-year-old can do that.’ And people say that. Chances are the 2-year-old can’t, but that’s not in and of itself an invalid response to art. If people feel that way, it’s worth engaging them and talking to them about what is really going on with this art.”

Ultimately, Barker said, the museum should bring viewers closer to a piece of art rather than distancing them, especially as art becomes more self-referential and abstract the further it evolves from the traditionally representational works of the early periods.

“In the 20th century, artists are playing off one another to a degree that makes it difficult for many people to walk in and immediately get what a given piece is trying to say,” he said. “That shouldn’t scare people away from art. It just means we have to do a better job of communicating what the in-joke is.”

Although Barker would like to use current innovation to better display the artwork, he said the motivation is not about putting the artwork in a current context: rather it is putting it in a “context that is accessible to people today.”

“What I don’t want to do is have technology supplant the art,” he said. “When you walk through the gallery, you should be focused on the art. Those labels, wherever you get them, are something that provides information. If they distract you and become the focus of your attention, then we’ve failed in using technology.”

Not only that, but the museum would fail in its mission: to better offer a place of reverence for the relics of history to be admired and examined by the masses, as well as connecting the faces and pieces of antiquity with today.

“What museums ideally should do is they should come and just attach jumper cables to people’s imaginations. It doesn’t matter what it is they’re interested in,” said Barker. “You bring in a kid who’s just interested in nuclear physics. I can get jazzed up about radio-carbon dating. Man, there’s no better explanation of nuclear physics than radio-carbon dating because it lets you touch on all the things, and yet it involves thing you can see, that are real. And it matters.

“It’s not just why you bother studying that,” he said. “I can tell you why it matters. And museums can always do that if you just give them a chance.”